Gregory's Again

Good to hear Clare Grogan on Radio 4 this morning.  Her voice sounded almost completely unchanged from the 80s.  Rather like all those nice HHGTTG people.

Between Olympics

Well, not quite.  The Paralympics have in fact started.  But I started this post in the hiatus between the two Games, and I'm not changing the title now.  So:

As I sit here between Olympics, and with the godawful ticketing system still not working properly, and not likely to let us get to see any Paralympic competitions up close in the near future, if at all, it seems a good time, as they say on Thought for Today, to pause and reflect.

We always expected the Olympics to be far, far better, and more worthwhile, than the benighted Jubilee - and they didn't disappoint.  We were on Dartmoor, on holiday, during the Opening Ceremony, which meant we got to watch it on a huge plasma TV.  Which was nice.

As every commentator - well most commentators - have said, it was astonishingly good. 

I have to admit, when I first heard about the bucolic idyll that was being planned, a fantasy English countryside, my heart sank. But even that was enlivened by the rippling blue cloth that covered the stands and allowed us to see the idyll as 'sea-girt'.

And then we tore it all up in the Steam-driven Pandemonium of the Industrial Revolution, led by  Sir Kenneth Branagh as Caliban (a theme for all four ceremonies it seems) - cum - Brunel.  Echoes of Blake and Milton. 

Followed by (in random order):-
- NHS nurses (a great invention from 1948)
- Liberty director Shami Chakrabarti.
- Suffragettes
- Voldemort from Harry Potter,  Rowling and Chitty, Chitty, Bang, Bang, and Mary Poppins (all representing children's literature?  But no Blyton I could see, nor Ahlberg, nor Kerr). And that section did  cause our 15-y-o to comment along the lines that the good socialist message of the NHS was undermined by the children in beds having to be saved by the privatised care of Mary Poppins...
- Beckham on a speedboat looking terribly stylish, and fireworks on Tower Bridge as it opened to let his ego through...
- The Swinging Sixties and psychedelia
- The Stunt Queen: so much more approachable than the one we have...
- The noise of the Tardis in the middle of another Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody...  (but why?)
- Rowan Atkinson & Simon Rattle in Chariots of Fire
A section on media (ish), introduced by the pips, Radio 4 and the Archers, leading to a house full of film and TV clips -  while decades of our pop and rock played...
- Python and Fawlty Towers, (let's ignore Eric Idle in the Closing Ceremony for the moment)
- A Matter of Life and Death
- Kes
- Gregory's Girl
- Bagpuss
- Queen Who Stones  Beatles
- Madness 
- Mud
- Jetpacks and Tim Berners-Lee
But sadly no Thunderbirds or HHGTTG or Fast Show that I noticed...

All really good fun.  But it did make me realise that we here at TANH appear to have been writing about the London 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony in half of our postings, without really knowing what we were doing...  It's like we were revising for it.

So is that it?  Do we have to stop writing about all that stuff now?

Living in the '80s?

Are we? 

We've just had David Attenborough yet again on Desert Island Discs
The Muppets are back
Adrian Mole is enjoying a renaissance
We have again got a stupid Tory, Eurosceptic government who don't listen to people
The Falklands are in the news
Iron Lady horror movie

... and we watched Gregory's Girl last night...

Bizarre Penguins

A few days ago in the Rye Hotel (a Nunhead Pub, by my definition), they decided to have what they called an "'80s evening". Now, I suspect this was mostly to do with the music they chose that night, but the bar staff also dressed up in what they imagined/recalled of the clothes of the '80s. Bubble-gum day-glo coloured tights for the girls and big hair. Quite unpleasant.

Which made me begin to think about the common themes of the decade that I could recall. Certainly opposing the iniquitous and incompetent Thatcher government was one of them, but I was looking for something iconic that crossed the political and the cultural domains.

Steve Bell obviously comes to mind - the greatest newspaper cartoonist of the period, and one who conveyed a real sense of outrage about politicians and all their works. Which leads us straight to The Penguin:

Aka Prince Philip of Greece/Pulp (later Lord) Quango. Born in the Falkland Islands in 1981 to a family of enthusiastic Empire Loyalists (hence the first name), the Penguin met Reg Kipling at the height of the Falklands war and never looked back. Essentially a free, anarchic though exceptionally cynical spirit who would by his own admission "do anything for a piece of fish", he was smuggled home by Kipling when hostilities finally came to an end. They lived in a flat in Peckham, which they later shared with the Penguin's partner, Gloria and their offspring Prudence and Percy. By coincidence Monsieur L'Artiste occupied the flat downstairs.
(According to the Guardian Website)

Note however, that unlike most other penguins, Bell's has teeth.

So now I was on to something. Where else in the decade did I remember a penguin from?

And then it came to me: my favourite film of the period, Gregory's Girl. I don't need to say much about this at all, ' cos it is just so wonderful. The boy in the penguin suit wandering around the school - marvellous. And of course it features the inimitable Chick Murray, as here:


And finally, to bring it up to date, the Bell Penguin is back on the Falklands and 'drilling' (see the strip a few days ago in the paper); also this week it was the 30th anniversary of Gregory's Girl and this picture - sad but sweet - was in all of the papers:
There was a special screening in Glasgow, and to quote The List:

Bill Forsyth captured teenage life and love with a perfect balance of humour and insight that touched audiences around the world – apparently it’s one of Scorsese’s favourites – and it was lovely to see that even today everyone involved is flabbergasted at the impact Gregory’s Girl continues to make. Special mention should also go to the penguin that made an appearance at the screening; as Gregory himself John Gordon Sinclair said, with tongue firmly in cheek, "If you don’t know what the penguin means, you don’t know Gregory’s Girl”.

And so I rest my case. The '80s was the decade of strange penguins.

Jazzer, Gregory, Tully Bascombe

Well, that was fun. I woke up to the Archers, Jazzer finally facing Fallon after declaring love to her - whilst very drunk - on New Year's Eve. She visits him as he's working with Tom's pigs, and all he can think of to say is 'These are the pigs'.

What with the Scottish accent and the inanity of the comment (really well scripted), it put me srrongly in mind of Gregory in Gregory's Girl. The same clumsy tongue-tied awkwardness.

Then a few hours later, I chanced upon The Mouse That Roared on one of the digital TV channels. Now, about nine months ago I wrote about the experience of Rewatching Kind Hearts and Coronets - the strange feeling that I knew it all so very, very well. Today I had something of the same sensation, although not quite so strongly, while watching this film.

I again recognised and predicted scenes, lines, gestures and - this time - noises (the Q Bomb); again that strange, unusual feeling.

Maybe it is because it isn't so mannered a film as Kind Hearts, or just not so good, or mayhap I know it less well, but the sensation was more attenuated. As I think I suggested last time, it isn't just memory, or it is stronger than that.

On no evidence whatsoever, I think I would possibly have the same feeling watching Gregory's Girl. I must try it.